Today's OTB features an excerpt from my friend Vitaliy Katsenelson's recently published The Little Book of Sideways Markets. Vitaliy is CIO at Investment Management Associates, a value investment firm in Denver, and he is a prolific and engaging writer (you can find and subscribe to his articles at http://ContrarianEdge.com). I had the pleasure of writing the foreword to Vitaliy's book, and here is a brief excerpt:

"Markets go from long periods of appreciation to long periods of stagnation. These cycles last on average 17 years. If you bought an index in the United States in 1966, it was 1982 before you saw a new high – that was the last secular sideways market in the United States (until the current one). Investing in that market was difficult, to say the least. But buying in the beginning of the next secular bull market in 1982 and holding until 1999 saw an almost 13 times return. Investing was simple, and the rising markets made geniuses out of many investors and investment professionals.